PROFILE: 'Julia's' Tilda Swinton

Associated PressTilda Swinton on playing a drunk in "Julia" -- "There's a kind of cliche of drunkenness in the cinema, I think, which is that it takes a loser to be a drunk and I just don't get that, I don't see that. Most of the drunks I know and love and have for years are amongst the most imaginative and curious and resourceful people."

STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- While the actress Tilda Swinton is quite imposing in person, this is only partly because of her appearance -- tall, thin, pale, with short, bleached blond hair. It's her intellect that forces you to raise your game.

Seated and leaning over a very small wooden table in the Chelsea offices of Magnolia Pictures, I instinctively leaned back as Swinton came in, sat down and leaned over the very same table. Having spoken to her before, I was prepared for this. I was also relieved that the 48-year-old Scottish actress is nothing like the character in her latest movie, "Julia," opening tomorrow in Manhattan.

Swinton plays a broken-down, half-crazed alcoholic in the film, a Los Angeleno who's seen better days. As the actress herself said of the character, "She probably looked really fantastic 20 years ago and really doesn't anymore. Maybe when she goes into the bathroom in the club when she's high she looks in the mirror and says, 'You look fantastic,' but if you're looking at her you can see that she's ruined, and I wanted to look ruined."

Well, mission accomplished. But it took some doing to turn this regal-looking actress, lean and clean on this day except for two fingers on her right hand stained black from signing autographs, into a drunken slattern.

"I wanted her to feel wasted. That meant disguising myself as her quite meticulously. I don't look like that," said Swinton. "It's genuinely uncomfortable carrying extra weight for me, and chain-smoking and constantly walking around in very high heels. It's not natural. But once I'd done that it was easy. I wanted to make it so that I didn't have to act, you know?"

More on that desire to not act in a moment, but "Julia," a wild ride of a picture by Erick Zonca, in which Swinton's character kidnaps a young boy from a rich family and then takes him to Tijuana, Mexico, where things really get crazy, did indeed make the actress's job easier in a number of ways, to hear her tell it.

"The movie's all over the place for a reason. We set out to make an alcoholic film, not just a film about an alcoholic. We wanted it to have that intoxicated feeling," said Swinton. "We wanted the texture of the film to feel quite documentary. That's not art direction. Those buildings that we went into are completely destroyed. When you walk into a real location like that you don't have to work at all. That's what I'm always aiming for, an opportunity not to work and just to play."

Swinton won a Oscar last year for her supporting turn in "Michael Clayton," for which she feels "immensely honored and grateful and flattered" and all of that, but also "a little like a mistake in the illustrious history of Oscar awards." The actress never expected to be in the position to win an Oscar, which most award winners may say, but she really didn't, and still doesn't.

"I don't think of myself as having an actor's life at all. I have nothing but another life. I have never, ever thought of myself as an actor. I've never even set out to be an actor. I intend on every film never to make another film. If I make another film it's because I'm invited to," she said.

She gets invited a lot these days, not just to the little, indie pictures like "Julia" that are her first love, but to sign on with the big Hollywood blockbusters as well. "It's not exactly been a move on my part, it's been a move on their part. It's been a mountain coming to Mohammed," she explains.

One does feed the other, however. Swinton's high-profile work in more formulaic fare allows the actress to devote her energies to films, like "Julia," that do not necessarily have a moralistic view.

"It's such a relief, I think, to see a film that doesn't do that. It is challenging, there's no doubt, and there are moments in it that are really difficult to watch," she admitted of this film. "It seems to me that the way the cinema works is that when a person is so central the invitation is that you enter the mind and spirit of that person, that you actually become that person," said the actress.

"And when you are asked to hold a gun against the head of a small child and tie him up and put him behind a sofa and feed him sleeping pills, must you go there because your avatar is behaving in this way? But you must."